


save me and i will save you

by quensty



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Not Really Character Death, mentions of killing but no real graphic scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 14:11:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6427141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quensty/pseuds/quensty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Trade tags?” Steve asks incredulously, setting his drink back down on the counter. “What exactly will that do?”<br/></p><p>Bucky sighs. “You can’t die if you’re wearing the wrong tag, Steve,” Bucky drawls, as if he’s explaining something terribly obvious. “It’s just not <em> allowed </em>.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	save me and i will save you

Steve Rogers prides himself on being the person to know the most about Bucky Barnes out of – anyone, really. They did spend a lot of time together, after all. (“Practically attached to the hip, you two are,” Steve’s mother had told them once, an irritated fondness on her face. She had given Bucky a nickel to buy milk at the store on Main while Steve should’ve hurried over to Miss Marline’s porch down the street and asked if he could have a cup of sugar for his mother, please. They’d ended up sticking together instead of separating, taking nearly double the amount of time they were supposed to. Steve’s mother had probably gone through a crises trying to decide whether she should be upset or amused. )

At this point, Steve never really got taken back by anything Bucky said anymore – most of the things he said were too ridiculous to take seriously anyway. Like the one time when Bucky took Steve to a restaurant and made a joke about one of the guys sitting at the bar, making Steve spit into his glass of water unceremoniously. Even after Steve got back home that night, his mouth was still humming from laughter.

So when Bucky pitches his idea, the glint in his eye unreasonably bright, Steve’s first instinct is to think it’s a joke, but Bucky’s pressed lips are straight and serious.

“Trade tags?” Steve asks incredulously, setting his drink back down on the counter. “What exactly will that do?”

Bucky sighs. “You can’t die if you’re wearing the wrong tag, Steve,” Bucky drawls, as if he’s explaining something terribly obvious. “It’s just not _allowed._ ”

Steve’s stare wavers, taking another long gulp of his drink. During the mission, when Steve had found Bucky strapped down to a metal table in Zola’s lab with tall, complicated machines all around him, Steve got the closest feeling to an asthma attack he’d had since he was injected with the serum. It was like something straight out of a horror film; Steve was half-expecting to find blood pouring out from a large wound in Bucky’s chest, or a knife jabbed into his throat. Bucky opening his eyes and whispering Steve’s name in a hoarse, weak tremor (but not _dead_ , not dead, thank _God_ ), Steve nearly doubled over from relief.

“Buck.” Steve shakes his head to clear it. “That’s not how it works.”

Steve should've expected that, too. Bucky has always been superstitious; back in Brooklyn, every Halloween when they were kids, Bucky never forgot to leave a necklace of onions on his doorknob before they left his house, and he always made sure to do the same thing to Steve’s. (“No way am I letting some vampire bite my sisters while I’m gone,” Bucky had explained to Steve’s strange look.) He shouldn’t have been surprised – honestly, it was just as ridiculous as anything he would’ve expected to come out of Bucky's mouth. But Bucky had always been straightforward on the fact that he was planning on surviving the war. Even Bucky mentioning dying in battle shook Steve to the core. It reminds him of Bucky on that table, and Steve doesn’t like thinking about it.

“It’s exactly how it works,” Bucky insists, moving his body to face Steve’s completely. Bucky’s elbow knocks into the shot glass and spills; he doesn’t seem to notice. “You can’t die wearing someone else’s name on your skin – it’s just plain wrong.”

Steve’s brow furrows into a ribbon. “I don’t think –“

“Exactly, you don’t think,” Bucky interrupts him, “I’m brilliant, and I say this will work. C’mon, Rogers,” Bucky says at the look Steve gives him. “With my name around your neck, the Reaper won’t even be able to get within a ten-foot radius of you.”  

Steve scrutinizes Bucky’s face, taking in his perfectly combed hair, skin smooth as glass. If Steve hadn’t found Bucky on that table, if he’d been too late, Steve doesn’t know what he would’ve done. Probably died in that fire, he supposes, maybe not, but the thought of losing Bucky would’ve killed him all the same. Bucky reaches over Steve and snatches his drink, tipping his head back to swallow the rest with an almost _inappropriate_ grandeur. On instinct, Steve looks away from the exposed skin of his neck to his hands, clenching and unclenching them experimentally. _It would’ve killed Steve to lose him._

“Are you sure you aren’t just drunk?” asks Steve after Bucky sets the drink back on the counter, smirking at the bend of a red on Bucky’s nose.

Bucky snorts. “Mm, maybe,” he relents, “but that doesn’t make me wrong.”

~

Right before their first mission, Steve decides that he doesn’t want his best friend to die; he slips the tag off his neck and offers it to Bucky silently. Enthusiasm coming out of him like a leaky faucet, Bucky takes it, tossing his own into Steve’s hands. He rubs a thumb over _Sargent James Buchanan Barnes_ engraved into the metal pendent before slipping it on. The chain snakes its way to towards the center of Steve’s sternum almost immediately, drawn there by a magnet or reeled in with a fishing line.

They trade tags for the next mission 40 miles past the Maginot Line. And for the next HYDRA base infiltration mission after that and the one after that. It becomes such a light, easy feeling – to carry each other’s names, a silent promise that helps both of them breathe a little easier, takes a weight off their already heavy boots, that at some point during the blur of exchanging hands, they just stop trading back. Bucky never mentions it, so neither does Steve.

Months later, hanging off a metal bar in the Alps, through the panic and overwhelming adrenaline, his mind thinking the same way you try seeing through misted glass, his gut twisting painfully, Steve tries reaching for Bucky’s arm, thrashing wildly for a grip. All around him, everything is white. He’s shouting for Bucky to hang on, to grab his hand.

 _You can’t fall_ , is what he doesn’t say _. I still have your name around my neck. You can’t let go._

Steve has had to see a lot of terrible things both before and during the war: his mother’s death; Erskine getting shot to the ground; men on both sides of the war disappearing into blue light, not even leaving any ashes behind to send back home to families. But the worst of it – the very worst of it is the whine the metal bar makes under Bucky’s grip right before it gives out. When Bucky falls through the rabbit hole, he goes with a rattling a cry and Steve’s name instead of his own.

The startling blow of it comes like a right-hook to the jaw. Steve can hardly believe it is happening even as it does, his knuckles bleeding white on the rail. He’s hyperaware of the chain under his uniform in that way shock makes you oversensitive and hyperaware to everything, wondering how on Earth Bucky Barnes – the only other person Steve’s mother ever kissed on the forehead, the person who broke a guy’s nose in high school for looking at his sister the wrong way, who tried to show Steve the basics of fighting after Steve came home one day with his eye swollen shut and a busted lip – could be dead.

It didn’t matter, in the end, whether Steve decided he wanted his friend to live or not.

~

For time afterwards, it’s difficult for Steve to find a reason to keep the tag with the name of James Barnes tattooed at the top. If it hadn’t made a difference in the end, Steve thought miserably. If it couldn’t save Bucky’s life, then what was the point?

It was still a part of Bucky, though, a small voice told him, and Steve was going to hang on to any part of Bucky he could hang on to, just like he’d always had.

So Captain America plunges into the Arctic, and 70 years later, he still has Bucky’s name when they mine him out of the ice.

~

The Winter Soldier was only ever allowed to carry around whatever they thought was necessary: knives as long as the span of his hand tucked in his belt, guns holstered to his hips and, just in case, a hidden pouch of ammo just under his shirt sleeve. Amor tied around the Asset’s shoulders and torso, on his elbows and knees. His face was always covered, long hair making the line of his face too vague to find the line of even if you were to use a bright light and a red pen.

Afterwards, when Project Insight is merely debris at the bottom of the Potomac, The Winter Soldier goes back. He finds what he’s looking for behind a bolted door and a cabinet filled with dusty files, the long, silver necklace sealed in a plastic bag and buried under heavy manila folders. _Steven Rogers_ is carved at the top of a small plate no bigger than his wrist. Nothing inside of The Winter Solider twists, not how he expected, but a memory like something from the back of a dark room swims to the surface, smudged at the edges. Colors blend together in his mind, voices as muffled and indistinct as the sound of a ticking clock under a pillow, faces whited to a point past recognition, but the sensation of a hand pressing a piece of warm metal into his palm is so surreal he has to check to make sure there’s nothing there.

Inside the folders, pictures of The Winter Soldier’s face are paper clipped to reports in Russian. There’s even one devoid of color, crinkling from age, at the bottom – but it isn’t _him._ In the picture, the man’s face is smooth and clean, his hair curling above his jaw instead of the nape of his neck. There’s even the faint glint of badges on his coat. Feeling his stomach churning, The Winter Soldier – _Bucky_ , that’s what The Man on the Bridge ( _Steve,_ something says in the corner of The Winter Soldier’s mind, _Steve_ ) called him – Bucky Barnes moves on without giving the files a second glance.

When Steven Rogers and his companion find Bucky in the abandoned HYDRA base, hunched over the dirty floor in an empty room, it is not an accident. He’s been taking intervals longer than 24 hours at a time there, now, not bothering to be careful about moving around, keeping a low profile, throwing off the system. He knows that Steve has been looking for him, has known this whole time, and the tag pushes Bucky to finally let him.

It’s a strange thing: HYDRA programed The Winter Soldier – programed _Bucky_ to never feel fear. Never feel anything. He would jump from top stories of a building and into the line of fire unhesitatingly, unflinchingly, and, yet, Bucky can’t think of any other reason why he’d hidden for so long, delayed jumping off this bridge, if not for fear. He can’t think of a better explanation for why he would be nervous to face Steve again, to officially drop the HYDRA brand on his head once and for all. It’s the strangest feeling of all, being afraid.

When Steve arrives, Bucky catches the tag tucked under his shirt right away. Looks for it, even. Steve had held it up to the fire in the helicarrier just before Bucky had settled to kill him, his face bloody and bruised, letting Bucky read off the name on the top. A flash of a memory sparked behind Bucky’s open eyes, one unlike the others. Not the newspaper clipping memories, excerpts of a story ripped out at random, but the kind of memory that came down in full force. A smiling, well-crafted face; hands in hands, the sound of metal clicking together. It threw Bucky so off-guard his arm froze in the air, caught between giving out the final blow and settling back at his side. Bucky’s eyes darted quickly from Steve’s face, to the chain, and back to him. His hand was still in the air. After that, Bucky only saved Steve from the water because of the necklace, only ever went back to the HYDRA base because he wanted to find one of his own. So Bucky looks at it now, cataloguing the way it settles over the place in Steve’s chest where, if Bucky were to press his ear to, he would be able to hear Steve's heartbeat.

“Bucky,” Steve says, “Do you remember me?”

There’s a moment of silence, Bucky still staring at Steve’s neck, Steve staring at Bucky’s face. Finally, Bucky slowly hooks the pendent with his thumb and forefinger from under his shirt, holding it up for Steve to see. His eyes widen into saucers.

Bucky responds with, “You’re the name on my skin.”

~

Later, much, much later – after the fight, after the war – Bucky says, “What did I tell you, Rogers? My name around your neck will keep you alive - because you can be damn sure I'm never gonna let you die. Not ever.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks, putting his whole hand over Bucky’s heart, over Steve’s own name on his skin. Just like this, Steve can almost swear he can taste Bucky’s heartbeat quicken. “And what does my name do around yours?”

Bucky seems to contemplate this for a moment, fingering the pendent through Steve’s own. Metal fingertips against metal. Steve’s hand grabs his, wrapping around it like a ribbon, tight and unshakeable. Bucky takes a breath, says slowly, “Your name?” He leans closer, until every part of his body is touching Steve’s. Their names touch between them. “Your name brought me back from the dead. Your name, Steve Rogers,” he repeats quietly, “makes me immortal.”


End file.
